While KEXP 90.3 (Seattle) should serenade us forever, Windows XP must shuffle off this mortal coil.

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Upgrade the XP boxes to Windows 7, introducing a leasing program for those that need hardware upgrades, and upgrading Office 2003 to Office 2013, while at the same time converting everyone to volume licensing. Throw in a standardized solution for working with PDFs, and we've arrived at the future!... well, the present at least.

We chose CDW because of their Legal-specific group's experience with various industry solutions. We went with Lenovo computers paired with Lenovo leasing to get the most bang for our buck, spread the cost out, get some good tax benefits, and keep our infrastructure more current.

Open License without Software Assurance was the choice for Office 2013 volume licensing, since CDW was able to roll the purchase into the lease. This bypassed the necessity of SA to spread the cost out, since management wasn't sold on the other benefits of SA. Additionally, Nuance PDF Converter was already being used by our second office location, so we decided to roll out the Enterprise version across the board at a fraction of the cost of Adobe Acrobat.
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This was my first major project/roll-out with the firm. I was still pretty unfamiliar with a lot of the idiosyncratic software and configurations here, so I wanted to take it nice and slow to keep downtime for each individual to a bare minimum and work out the kinks as I went.

While I certainly could have taken my predecessor's route and custom built each system, I thought that, given everything else needing attention, pre-built would be a better use of my time. Having worked with CDW at a previous job, I knew they could be a useful resource. As a department of one—and new to the Legal industry—I wanted to leverage their experience and assistance as well as offload some of the vendor relations. I worked with my CDW account rep to dial in on some desktops and laptops that would meet our users' needs, cross-checking of course with reviews on Spiceworks and around the web. As an added bonus, it was cheaper to have CDW install the RAM upgrades than to order them with 8 GB straight from Lenovo.

I started by migrating some of the more savvy and, well, forgiving staff first. I also decided to use Windows Easy Transfer to migrate each individual's profile and settings to try to help them acclimate more quickly to their new computers. For the most part this worked as intended. It took a few migrations to dial in on what should be included in the transfer, as you can customize this quite a bit. There were also a few MS Office configuration issues due to changing from 2003 to 2013 while trying to retain a bunch of settings plus custom forms and macros. As you'll no doubt recall, the change from Office 2003 to 2007 was the big one, so for folks here to have to make the jump all the way to the 2013 UI, well... it tended to be a more difficult adjustment for my "power users" than for the less savvy.

Since this was a migration from 32-bit XP to 64-bit Win7 some things flat-out could not be migrated. I discovered our phone system monitoring software, which all the staff used daily, was 16-bit, so I just had to say, "Sorry, it's too old to work with the new systems, and that telecom company was sold off almost a decade ago." I cobbled together a custom 32-bit Win7 machine though, so the receptionists could still do their job.

Other things were full of win. The switch from a hodgepodge of old Adobe versions to full-fledged Nuance PDF Enterprise for everyone has been great—from simply converting image PDFs to searchable text all the way to taking Bates numbering from a several-hour process down to a several-minute process.

Once the staff were upgraded and issues had been ironed out, I upgraded the attorneys. Their assistants were then able to help them adjust. Unfortunately the last hold-out were the "Bookkeepers" (i.e. Finance Dept.). It took some time and troubleshooting to get all of their custom reports working on the new systems, so I had to wait until well after their year-end work was completed. (Access 2003 reports upgraded to Access 2013 referencing SQL databases, in case you were wondering.)

It was a bit unnerving running XP that long past its shelf-life, but I leveraged CDW's complimentary Threat Check (http://www.cdw.com/it-solutions/threat-check.aspx) to make sure I wasn't missing anything. There was only one XP box engaged in monkey-business, which I quickly put the kibosh on. Other than that, our configuration was sound, and we had a clean bill of health.
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One noteworthy takeaway isn't actually feasible until you get to know your users. In fact, it may not be evident until after a migration such as this.

*When planning your migration, if at all possible upgrade your complainers the very last, so they don't scare your other users or sour their adjustment period with negative bias.*

This barely came into play here and has not had a perceptible, lasting impact, but it is something I had not considered before. In less congenial offices it could make your migration unnecessarily difficult and negatively affect perceptions of your decision-making and performance. Fortunately, that was not the case this time for me.

All in all, it went very well. No one really had downtime apart from my test subjects, and the learning curve for my users was pretty negligible. I also gained a more thorough understanding of the software, workflow, and systems specific to this environment. Slow and steady definitely won the race.